Category: Politics

Irony culture is polluting the internet. Everywhere you go you see its tentacles, taking every good thing and getting ironic over it. As if saying something ironically is automatically a joke. Anyone remember those eyes when everyone was sarcastic all the time, as if that meant they were ‘tough’ or you were stupid for not reading between the lines? The internet’s irony culture of ‘shitposting’ is its heir. Like any major event, the terror attack on Ariana Grande’s concert became a canvas for these people to launch their jokes from. Actually, events like these – horrible, traumatic, death-filled – tend to be their favorite events.

Now, gallows humor is fine and all. Humor is important. It helps us keep a distance from things and break the ring of sacredness. If we can laugh at something, it’s not holy and we can criticize it and improve on it. Nothing should be beyond humor, but nothing is also beyond criticism. So now I’m about to explain why all these jokes about the terror attack are bad. Some people from the Irony Culture will call me ‘oversensitive’. I will call them ‘oversensitive’ for not being able to present a claim of their own.

I don’t know how to make this any clearer. A terror attack is traumatic. Many people will never be the same after this. It changed their lives forever. The songs and the artist will forever be connected in their heads to an attack whose purpose is to install fear and dread in them. 22 people have died, and that means at least 88 – and I’m being extremely minimal here – will live with a permanent loss nothing can replace.

Just to show you how trauma works, I live in Israel. Many here live under constant thread of rockets and are always afraid of the sound of the alarm. Some time ago there was a Post-Apoc LARP (Live-Action Roleplaying) called Sunburn. The organizers didn’t tell the players that there will be alarms. Not only the fictional alarms triggered these people, many also thought they were real. It wrecked their whole experience.

If you still don’t get what ‘trauma’ means, just ask someone to violently beat you up.

As I said, humor about anything is fine. However, we need to be careful when and where we post our gallows humor. Right now, when we’re still suffering from the fallout of that attack is not the time. That attack is fresh in people’s minds. They still need to truly realize that, yes, this happened and they are mortal and someone can blow them.

The internet is an unregulated mass communication tool that must not be censored, but that’s not a reason to spread it all over. We control the content we see only halfway. If I enter a meme site with hoping to manage my stress thanks to surviving a terror attack and I see memes about a terror attack and all the trauma rises up – who’s to blame? Why must it be this way?

Some did get that perhaps it’s nicer to wait a bit before making fun of other people’s trauma, so even that became a joke:

Another important element of gallows humor is that you need a joke. Without saying something actually funny about the subject, all you do is make fun of dark topics which cause pain and suffering to everyone – including you. There is no joke in this picture, unless the joke is about how memesters don’t have anything else to do but produce worthless memes. Then again, I think they’re too sensitive to actually joke about themselves.

I don’t know. I get it that you don’t like Pop music. Some of us are still stuck in the days of ‘real music’ where only Foo Fighters were considered good. Still, where’s the joke here? You found a pseudo-clever way of telling people you dislike Ariana Grande by making fun of a terrible event. I’m not sure how else to classify this behavior other than being an asshole and inconsiderate.

Oh man, I can’t help it. This is Dr. Strangelove-level of funny. Get it? The joke is, Grande is a horrible singer (Pop music isn’t real music, remember) and people dying – especially in terror attacks – is funny! Death is so funny, in fact, that we make sure everyone can experience it if they want to using assisted suicide! Aren’t funerals only second to the Holocaust in their funny-ness?

It’s kind of odd. Someone would actively take an image and write a semi-ironic text about how someone not dying is a bad thing. I’m trying to understand the psyche of doing this, of finding the bummer over someone not-dying a sentiment worth showing the world. Better yet, contextualize it in a meme so you could laugh about it and be ironic. There are so many layers of irony here I’m not sure what the joke is. Yes, some memes’ source of funny is only because they reference a pattern. Lord knows I find the ‘cracking open a cold one’ meme hilarious, but that’s only because I really like beer. Besides, the joke is rarely something cruel. Since there is no funny here, what is the joke?

“Oh, lighten up!” they say and I wish I could – or I wish I wouldn’t, since my ways of having include more than finding terror attacks funny. Every act of communication has a purpose. The nature of being is communicative. We communicate humor, emotions and ideas. By understanding what and why we communicate we can communicate better and face the communication of others better.

So I’m trying to get underneath all this humor. Since its surface is incredibly unfunny, maybe by getting down to it I can find insight into an alien culture. Sadly I face an empty well devoid of funny and full of laughter at the theatre of tragedy and the carnival of carnage that is terror and violence. If terror and violence were that funny, they wouldn’t be staples in horror films. Moreover, if you didn’t view this post as an attack – and this post claims you’re insensitive, unethical and that your sense of humor is dead like Nietzsche’s horse – you wouldn’t get all defensive over it.

The funeral of the irony culture will be a celebration. Bring your own stereo.

Look, I love TumblrinAction. The things they post are hilarious. They’re so disconnected from reality and logic, so dying to protect their little worldview that they will lash at everything. I talked to religious people who stick to their dogma, but it’s never like this. The religious often have a sense of doubt and humility. They think, “God shows me X and Y. The rest isn’t up for me”. The posts on TumblrinAction are different.

Check this picture. This person is sure he has to resort to fanfiction because gay people are so hard to find in literature. Now, of course there will be less gay people than straight ones in literature. There are less gay people overall. It’s how I can’t expect Jews to feature in a lot of books, because Jews are a worldwide minority (Actually, they do have a presence in literature for some reason but that’s a different discussion). I only have to Google ‘Gay Literature’ and I get a huge Wikipedia article that even links to a page about gay literature from Singapore.

In this one, they rail against nature. You were born blonde? Too bad! You appropriate cultures and are a racist! It’s funny how quickly this degenerates into saying people are X because of what they were born with. Isn’t that how racism works?

As hilarious as that subreddit is, we need to remember this. No matter how good an idea is, it can still attract morons. We will still eat our favorite type of food just because it has the potential to attract flies.

TumblrinAction is useful in displaying what went wrong with social justice. As an idea, it’s not bad. There’s no reason why one group should have more power over another because of illegetimate reasons. There’s no need to discriminate people based on skin color or sex or body structure.

Social justice, at its best, makes us question assumptions about society. Racism and sexism are dogmatic. They do not encourage discussion. They promote the idea that individuals belong in a certain group and that determines their value. These are inherent traits that can’t change. These are not fluid categories that change, nor do they have scientific basis. Sex exists, but it’s not our only trait. Race is complete pseudoscience.

Social justice should make us these question these assumptions and categories. It should question the main narrative, offers a new one but make sure the new one is also open to criticism. If you criticize something but refuse to check the flaws in your alternative, you do not care about improving things anymore. You only care about gaining power.

It’s similar to the Left/Right axis. The purpose stops being improvement or solving problems and it become defeating some enemy. That’s what we see in a lot of social justice discussions today. They’re not really discussing specific issues, but just look for ways to push the narrative of victimhood. That’s why EverydayFeminism publishes an article about how focusing on female pleasure is misogynistic (because it might! Just might put pressure on her) or the article about “People say Islam is homophobic because of racism”, sweeping away any evidence.

Criticism of these people can easily degenerate into what they are. If the only social justice content you encounter is from TumblrinAction, you’ll become just another raving extremist. I haven’t seen it in the subreddit itself, but I’ve seen people react this way to the content that gets published there.

A guy on Facebook keeps ranting about feminists, how they are all full of hate and uses examples from crazies on Tumblr. The irony is, MRA’s rarely talk about raped-males and such issues in a way that’s not a weapon against feminism (Dear MRA’s: Male victims of rape aren’t weapons in your silly little war). He cheered for the removal of feminism from history lessons. Apparently, since feminists offended him now it’s okay to remove facts from history lessons. There was even a post which could be summed up as “You got raped because it’s your own fault”.

This is not a person who believes in equality and is frustrated with what feminism became. I’m not going to get on anyone’s ass just because they don’t label themselves feminists. I tackle ideas, not people. Still, this is an example of a person who doesn’t care about equality or anything. It’s about defeating the feminists, the so-called hateful bigots. Issues aren’t discussed. Rather, he posts rants about feminists or by feminists and use it as proof they’re out to get our precious fluids.

We must be wary of being too attached to our ideas. The purpose of our ideas is to be useful. If an idea isn’t true nor useful, it must be discarded no matter how much we love it. Ideas are supposed to serve us. We shouldn’t serve ideas. The question rises: Some people will stick to ideas that only benefit themselves and might harm others, no?

Of course, but this is a different discussion, of selfishness vs. community. Even if what drives you is pure selfishness, you still need to avoid getting attached to ideas. You might miss ideas that will benefit you more.

First I was a leftwinger. Then I was a rightwinger. There was a time I preferred calling myself either Liberal or Conservative. There was even a period where I thought Neoconservativism might be the thing for me. Every time I found a team to be a part of, it felt good. I looked at the other side and called them names, like genocidal maniacs or ignorant racists. Something about that demonizing made me feel weird, though. I wanted to be right, but all I heard from my fellow team mates is that the other side is terrible and gay. Just because someone else is wrong doesn’t make me right.

In the latest elections in my country, the campagnes were an embarassment. I had no idea who to vote for. All they could do is sling mud at each other. I looked at the propaganda films and was shocked. Is that how adults behave? Are the leaders of our country trying to convince me using silly jokes instead of talking about the issues?

The problem was never the Liberals or Conservatives. The problem was in this division.

My first arguement was that neither Leftwing nor Rightwing presents a coherent ideology/philosophy. That was a silly statement. There is no Communist Manifesto for any of them, but the Communist Manifesto doesn’t easily sum up Communism. No school of thought is uniform. Capitalism, Existensialism, Buddhism, Antinatalism, Feminism – these are big, complex ideas that take various forms. Some have more variety than others. Antinatalism, for example, is a very simple idea to grasp. Still, expecting a word to easily sum up an idea is foolish.

So that’s not what was wrong with this axis. What was wrong was how it created sport teams.

It causes a divison into sport teams. There are Leftists, and there are Rightists. They’re fighting for power in the government. This means that the main concern of each side is not improving the country but gaining power and defeating the Other.

Left and Right are presented as a dichotomy. You’re either Democratic or Republican. You have to choose a team. Once you choose a team, you have to stay loyal to your team. That means never, ever agreeing with the opposite team.

How people react whe encountering different opinions

Once a team takes hold of an opinion, the other team must not agree with it. Gay Rights is often attributed to the Left. That’s why I see Rightwingers here being hesitant to support it. Instead of trying to promote Gay Rights, many of them talk about how the Left uses it to ‘gain power’. There is some truth to that. The Left uses it to paint the Right as narrow-minded, homophobic and evil.

Another example is how people on the Right will rarely criticize the Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Despite all their supprt for the army, they won’t criticize a group who refuses to help defend the country. If you so believe in defending the country, you should be just as harsh on those who refuse to serve because they’re reading a book. Because the Ultra-Orthodox are on the Right side though on subjects such as security (I’m pretty sure most of them object to a Palestinian state), people on the Right remain silent on their parasitic behavior.

These teams have stopped promoting issues. Neither the Right nor Left is doing anything with Gay Rights. All they’re doing is using it to pain the opposite team badly.

In truth, there are no opposite teams. It’s all Spaceship Earth. All people should have an interest in What Is Best for the Country. Of course people will disagree on What Is Best because everyone comes from different backgrounds. Yet how will we know what is best, how will we improve our country if we don’t try to improve our understanding?

Both the Left and the Right want to live in a secure country. The Arabs want it, too. Unless someone is suicidal, no one really wants to live with rockets flying over their head all the time. The question is, how we make the country more secure? Sadly, the Right and the Left are too attatched to their answers. The Right is too afraid of the Arabs. The Left is too afraid to acknowledge there is racism, homophobia and hatred outside our walls. These people don’t want to find the right answer. They want the answer they already have to be right, no matter what.

So long as we want our answers to be right rather than to find the right answers, we’re looking for enemies to beat down instead of learning.

I’m not a Rightwinger nor Leftwinger. There are some ideas I consider myself a part of, but even then my version of them is my own. Do not ask what box to put me in. Ask what’s in my box instead.

There were elections in Israel. If you haven’t heard of it, Israel is a country that’s known to make Muslims feel bad because of its rather secular laws and all the gays that don’t get executed. If you have followed the news of the election, you probably heard Netanyahu won. You probably also encountered a lot of insults with very little evidence that made you wonder whether 13-year-old Rage Against the Machine fans now run the news agencies.

Here are a few views from inside.

The elections are for the Knesset, the lawmaking body. The more votes a party gets, the more Knesset Members (KM’s, also known as mandates) get in. Then, after everyone finds their seat the coalition and opposition form. Coalition will always be bigger than the opposition, and it’s the governing body. It won’t necessarily be led by the biggest party. You don’t just need a lot of KM’s, but you also need a lot of other parties by your side.

Parties sometimes join forces and run for the elections as “lists”.

These are the big parties:

Likud – led by Netanyahu, recognized as the main right-wing party
Zionist Camp/HaMachane HaTzioni – A united list of Labor/Ha’Avoda party and The Movement/HaTnua’a. It’s recognized as the main left-wing party, and is led by Herzog from Labor.
Future/Yesh Adit – Led by Yair Lapid, is recognized as centrist
The Jewish Home/HaBait HaYehudi – a more far-right party led by Nafatali Bennet, and represents the more religious population of Israel
Meretz – The far-left party, led by Zehava Galon.
Israel Our Home/Israel Beitenu – A secular far-right party, let by Avigdor Lieberman, generally associated with the secular Russian population
Shash – An Ultra-Orthodox party
Judaism of the Torah/Yehadut HaTorah – Another Ultra-Orthodox party
All of Us/Kulano – Led by Moshe Kachlon, formerly part of the Likud
The United List – A union of the biggest Arabic parties. The controversial Chanin Zoabi is here. There’s a decent amount of illegalities going around in this party that are probably overlooked in order not to seem racist.
Together/Yahad – A much more far-right and religious party. It’s led by a former member of Shash, and includes Otzma LeIsrael (Power to Israel), a very far-right party that’s known to be borderline racist

There are also a lot of small parties, such as:
Green Leaf/Ale Yarok – A party whose sole purpose is the legalization of marijuana. It’s popular among self-centered morons
The Greens/HaYerukim – A party with an evironmentalist agenda
The Pirates/HaPiratim – Part of the global pirate movement
Orr/Light – A strictly secular party dedicated to the seperation of church and state
Economy Party/Mifleget Kalkala – A weird thing that sits very close to satire.

In order to get into the Knesset, you need to get a certain percetentage of the votes. That percentage is loosely translated as “Block Percentage”. A common thinking in many Israelis is to only vote for parties that can pass this percentage. Votes for parties that don’t pass don’t count in the end.

Now, which party gained my vote?

Choosing was a tiring process. I haven’t encountered enough reasons for or against Netanyahu. He did a few moronic things, such as responding to a report regarding rising prices with “Yeah, but Iran”. The Jewish Home is too religious. Like Likud, I haven’t encountered a reason to vote for Zionist Camp. If anything, the fact they poured so much money into a campagne that’s nothing but ad hominem made them look like little kids. The few times I saw interviews by Herzog, he seemed like he cared much more about replacing Netanyahu than anything.

Kachlon, aside from the reform he did with the mobile companies, didn’t seem to have much to offer. There wasn’t anything bad there, but nothing for it. Lapid seemed like a great option, but there was a lot of criticism against him. Some of which was horseshit (“He didn’t do anything!” the previous Knesset lasted barely 3 years), some of which made sense (He wasn’t very consistent, and what he said didn’t reflected in his actions). While I respect Lieberman’s bluntness, his party says little but keeping Israel safe. He actually has potential to be a right-wing party that’s also about secularism, but he doesn’t take his party much further.

While I agree with a lot of Meretz’s views, their method seems to be mainly “We’re not right-wingers!”. Their leader is especially very emotional. When it was revealed that a lot of members in Jewish Home are against gay marriage, Galon wrote a long Facebook post that was supposed to make me think Bennet and his buddies are on some ISIS shit. Lapid just mentioned he was for gay marriage. Meretz also seem to be totally unaware of the realities of Islamic terror.

The Ultra-Orthodox parties and the United List are a no-brainer. The Ultra-Orthodox parties care about almost nothing but the interest of the Ultra-Orthodox. The United List contains a few extemists (Chanin Zoabi is the most famous ones) who are actually breaking the law. Yahad is supposed to be on the extreme side of the right-wing, much more than Lieberman and Bennet. While I think Israel should remain ‘Jewish’, as in, this is the ethnic majority, the religion must stay out of the gouvernment.

So, I found myself looking at the small parties, the ones who don’t pass the percentage.

Green Leaf were worthless. They had a few interesting points in their website, but it was obvious their main concern is marijuana. The only reason to vote for them is if you’re a self-centered teen who thinks marijuana is actually going to save us. The Pirates had great ideas, but Orr had better.

There was a great Facebook post by Orr where they pointed out that the division is, in fact, not between right/left wings but between the religious and the secular. They are right. Meretz to Israel Our Home, all of these parties are talking about the same subjects. They have different views, but there is room for dialogue. The Ultra-Orthodox parties, however, are concerned mainly with their populations and ditto for the united list. Orr, unlike Meretz, also recognize we’re fighting a religious enemy. This is not just a nationalistic conflict, but a religious one – between Islam and secularism.

As for the result, my main disappointment is the structure of the coalition. Herzog and Netanyahu fought like little kids, and now we’re stuck with Ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition. It’s too bad they couldn’t see that it’s better for the country if they both sit together, rather than apart. I don’t know if I can blame them.

If I learned anything from the Israeli media during the elections, it’s that there’s no room for debates. Leftists are drugged idiots who will sell us and kill us all. Rightwingers are paranoid schizophrenics who want to kill every single arab. Political debates are terrible. People try to convince you to vote for their party not via evidence or logic, but by raising their voice and strawmanning. The idea that a party you won’t vote for can still have valid points escaped people. Go tell a Likudnik that Meretz’s secularism is needed, and he’ll go off on how crazy they are. Tell a Herzog fan that we need the right-wing’s caution, and you’ll be called a murderer.

The thing I worry about the most is not how the coalition will function, but that we haven’t hit rock bottom of discussions. Anti-intellectualism has been aggressively promoted, and I fear that in the next go round it will get even stronger. I hope not.